The Best User Experience Design: Simplicity

You’ve booked your plane tickets. You’ve scheduled your grocery delivery. You finalized your short list of your top five candidates for completing your next big project. And you did it all from your phone. In less than an hour. While you sat in the back seat of a car.

How did you get it all done so fast? How have these tasks become so easy?

Easy — It’s in the Design

The audience’s ease of experience should always be the goal of design. Easy means simple, and simple is always best. Simple respects your time.

Simplicity is what you want for your brand’s message. When your audience understands what you mean, and where to go next, your message is reaching them. Reaching them, and staying with them.

Simplicity Has Impact

Energy saved while locating information puts the focus on your message. Questions are answered. Decisions are easy to make. Interest is maintained. Movement from one key piece of information to the next happens without effort. Your audience leaves with a complete understanding of your message. That level of engagement leaves an impact that lasts.

Simplicity Creates Connection

We buy from people we trust. We give to causes we believe in. We keep coming back to brands that make their value clear. Simplicity in design reinforces that sense of brand loyalty. Your audience finds what they are looking for and that’s relaxing. It breaks down barriers. They perceive that your brand meets their needs. They remember that it was easy and enjoyable to interact with you.

Simplicity is Efficient

Creativity within restraints is the key to strong design. You have specific goals. You have a brand identity to reinforce. You have a specific budget for doing it all. Merging these criteria into a simple product is actually complex in process. But don’t worry — a good designer takes care of the complexity for you.

Design principles, organizational principles, checklists — all essential to the design process. Knowing how to edit away what doesn’t reinforce the message enhances clarity. Good designers create simplicity by creating a direct path for the audience. Powerful and effective design results from this ability to channel creativity through systems. To keep the best and leave out the rest.

Complex processes, informed planning, attention to every detail — doesn’t seem simple, does it? In fact, it’s not simple. It is simply systematized.

Originally published on LinkedIn.